Thinking in Place

Carol Becker, preeminent arts educator and contributor to leading art magazines, offers a beautifully poignant meditation on the role of place in artistic creativity. She focuses on place as a historical, physical entity and a conceptual site where ideas come into meaning. The book explores places from the coal-mining towns of western Pennsylvania, to the Birla House where Gandhi was shot, to the sinking city of Venice. A cross between theory, memoir, and history, her writing creates the experiential effect of being in specific places as well as imagining the evolution of ideas as they are manifested in museums and often become agents for social change. Chapter I Prologue; Chapter 1 Defining Place; Chapter 2 Museums and the Neutralization of Culture; Chapter 3 Countervaillance; Chapter 4 Beyond Categorization; Chapter 5 Where the Green Ants Dream; Chapter 6 Pilgrimage to My Lai; Chapter 7 Archives of Apartheid; Chapter 8 Gandhi’s Body; Chapter 9 Acqua Alta;